Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Katrina: The loss of New Orleans wasn’t just a tragedy. It was a plan.

Published on 9/30/2005 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

“This was not a close call,” Viscusi says. “It’s a no-brainer that you do this.”



An important analysis for Reason by Jonathan Rauch (ht: Glenn Reynolds):

In any given year, then, figure that the expected economic cost of the swamping of New Orleans is $1 billion (divide the $200 billion cost over 200 years). A $2 billion levee project could be expected to pay for itself, probabilistically speaking, in two years; a $14 billion Delta restoration project, in 14 years.

But wait. New Orleans’s 200-year flood might take place a century from now instead of right away (remember, this analysis is from a pre-Katrina standpoint), and money lost in the future matters less to us than money lost today. At an interest rate of 3 percent, Viscusi says, the present value of averting $1 billion in expected annual damage forever is $33 billion; at 5 percent, $20 billion; at 10 percent, $10 billion. Any of those numbers is higher than the estimated cost of hurricane-proofing the levees, and all but the smallest are higher than restoring the Delta.

Now, recall that those calculations reflect only tangible monetary cost. They do not account for inconvenience, pain and trauma, lives uprooted, and, above all, lives lost. Even a superbly organized evacuation would leave thousands of people behind. Moving nursing home patients, emptying hospitals, and losing control of the streets are dangerous at best. To all of which, add the psychic and cultural blow of leaving one of the country’s most historic cities an empty ruin.

Strock told reporters that decisions about the levees were based on “whether it’s worth the cost to the benefit, and then striking the right level of protection.” Unless one uses very optimistic assessments of hurricane odds and economic costs, and also places a low value on human costs, New Orleans did not strike the right level of protection. Even in foresight, Naomi’s characterization of New Orleans’s vulnerability as “tantamount to negligence” appears justified. A far larger flood-prevention program should have been under way.

“This was not a close call,” Viscusi says. “It’s a no-brainer that you do this.”

More to come on the importance of educating the public on risk analysis.

Regulations were not the reason Able Danger intelligence was purged

Published on 9/30/2005 in Counter Terrorism . Closed Tags: .

bulletin was the lead federal prosecutor on the first World Trade Center bombing, and several other key anti-terror prosecutions. He knows the law relevant to counter-terrorism intimately. He is appalled by Pentagon actions related to Able Danger:

After the worst domestic attack in the history of the United States, the constant refrain was that “9/11 changed everything.” All “walls” were taken down. Intelligence agents and criminal investigators — until then hindered from cooperating — were now to work hand-in-hand. National security was in. Obsession over imaginary civil-rights violations was out. The message was clear: Gather all the information, get it into the right hands, and connect all the dots.

Well it looks like the memo never made its way over to the Pentagon.

In mid-2000, the Department of Defense (DoD) intentionally purged a gargantuan amount of intelligence about al Qaeda — the enemy that had just blown up our embassies in east Africa and was even then scheming to bomb a navy destroyer in Yemen. The materials were generated by the “Able Danger” program, which attempted to map al Qaeda by sophisticated data mining. Although that program was itself highly classified, it drew mostly on open-source (i.e., non-classified) information. According to participants, the effort yielded leads that might have uncovered the 9/11 plot if diligently followed.

…

In the Information Era, the world is increasingly small. Thus, in the course of carrying out those missions, it frequently happens that DoD intelligence services will incidentally capture information about U.S. persons. Does that mean these services need to shed that information, even if it could be vital to our safety?

Of course not. The whole point of the governing regulations is to allow the military to keep intelligence that might save American lives. Thus, Dugan conceded that the rules set forth 13 broad reasons for retaining information about U.S. persons. They are worth setting out, as Dugan did in his submitted testimony:

1. Information obtained with consent.

2. Publicly available information.

3. Foreign intelligence.

4. Counterintelligence.

5. Potential sources of assistance to intelligence activities.

6. Protection of intelligence sources and methods.

7. Physical security. [with a foreign nexus/connection]

8. Personnel security.

9. Communications security.

10. Narcotics. [international narcotics activity]

11. Threats to safety. [with a foreign nexus/connection — such as international terrorist organizations]

12. Overhead reconnaissance.

13. Administrative purposes. [training records — a narrowly drawn category].

There are few of these categories that would not provide, by themselves, a justification to maintain intelligence gathered on U.S. persons in the course of tracking an international terrorist organization and its members who were in the process of plotting to mass murder American civilians and military personnel. And that’s leaving aside that the information we are talking about was, for the most part, actually gathered from publicly available information (a justifying category unto itself — see, No.2, above)

So, al Qaeda and Atta did not even trigger U.S. person concerns, and even if they had there would have been abundant rationales for retaining the Able Danger harvest (not to mention getting it into the FBI’s hands). Why, then, was vital intelligence purged?

The answer has nothing to do with the regulations. It’s all about mindset. The suicide ethos.

Definitely read the complete article.

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Sudden and bewildering fairness from British news organs

Published on 9/29/2005 in Israel , Media and Middle East . Closed Tags: .

A rational policy statement from Britain’s Minister of State for the Middle East, an objective BBC broadcast on Israeli settlers, and a hard-hitting and critical interview with Rafiq Husseini — Abbas’s chief of staff. All thanks to Abracadabrah (via a Clive Davis trackback).

Assimilation, Terrorism and History

Published on 9/29/2005 in Counter Terrorism and U.K. . Closed Tags: .

An important short essay by Lexington Green – you’ll definitely want to read the entire essay:

Jim Bennett has a good piece on assimilation of immigrants in the USA, which gives some idea of how hard this was to do in the past, and what it will take the UK to do the same thing. The fact that the 7/7 suicide bombers were home-grown came as a shock to many in the UK. This shock has set in motion a conversation, which may eventually be fruitful, to try to define what it is that immigrants to the UK should be trying to assimilate to. In other words, before you can say to someone, “if you want to come here, you have to decide to become one of us”, you need to answer the question for yourselves: “who are we?” This is a question many people don’t want to engage with. It leads to further questions, “why are we who we are?” and “is what we are good? Is it worth defending? Worth taking risks for? Worth dying to defend?” One early cut at defining a set of “core values” for Britain was this piece. It is a good list.

Creating a consensus on anything like this is very difficult, especially these days, either in UK, or the USA, and giving affirmative answers to these questions is even harder. The “commanding heights” are held by a news media, an entertainment industry and an academic community which convey a message of disdain for the history of these countries, which see little of value in their past or present, and which are actively opposed to the idea of assimilation.

If you teach generations of people nothing but the crimes of their ancestors and the corruption of their existing institutions, which is an incomplete and hence false depiction, they are unlikely to have the cohesion and confidence needed to insist that immigrants adopt certain base-line values and practices. In ordinary times this deficiency can be “kicked down the road”, since it may not seem urgent. However, it turns out to be a structural weakness when mortal threats arise.

The big picture

Published on 9/29/2005 in Media , Middle East and Politics . Closed Tags: .

Somehow I missed this 26 September Michael Barone essay the first time around. Fortunately Carl at No Oil for Pacifists was on the ball and didn’t miss Barone’s summary of the good news (and the not so good) that holds no interest for the media:

It’s often hard to keep the big picture in focus. Television news tends to center on bombs going off in Iraq and has mostly ignored several million people voting in Afghanistan. We see footage of angry Palestinians, but not much about the ongoing progress toward democracy in Egypt. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in turn have dominated the news and have made it difficult to get a sense of what is happening in the world.

A world spinning out of control: That is what the old-line broadcast networks seem to be showing us. But I see other patterns. George W. Bush has consistently asserted that one reason for removing Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was to advance freedom and democracy in the Middle East. In spite of the improvised explosive devices, that seems to be happening. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution was as inspiring an example of people power as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Libya has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. Egypt, by far the largest Arab nation, had its first contested election this month, and, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius writes from Cairo, “the power of the reform movement in the Arab world today … is potent because it’s coming from the Arab societies themselves and not just from democracy enthusiasts in Washington.” Which is evidence that Bush was right: Muslims and Arabs, like people everywhere, want liberty and self-rule. Afghanistan has just voted, and Iraq is about to vote a second time this year. Violence continues, but the more important story is that democracy and freedom are advancing.

…

Polls show that most Americans think the economy is in dreadful shape, even though almost all the numbers are good: Inflation and unemployment are low, and growth is robust despite the exogenous shocks of Sept. 11, Enron and Katrina.

…

…The recent Pew Trust polls showing diminishing support for Islamist terrorism in Muslim countries indicate things are moving in the right direction. The increasing interweaving of China into the international economy suggests China may not be a military threat. A world spinning out of control? No, it is more like a world moving, with some backward steps, in the direction we want.

Who Ruined Gaza?

Published on 9/29/2005 in Israel and Middle East . Closed Tags: .

Bruce Kesler at the Democracy-Project has a great piece (with key resources) on the true story of Gaza before and after Arafat:

Then came Arafat:

“This combination of corruption and terrorism proved catastrophic… [W]ithin six months of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, the standard of living in the strip fell by 25%, and more than half of the area’s residents claimed to have been happier under Israel. Things got much worse in 2000… Arafat’s terror war… eradicat[ed] the fragile fabric of civil society that had been developing in the territories during the decades prior to his arrival. Unemployment increased from 10% to an average of 41% during 2002, and the proportion of the population that was poor rose from 20% to over 50%…”

Another, even more in-depth, resource is discussed here: In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine.

Saddam’s Nasty Legacy

Published on 9/29/2005 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

Saddam may be out of business, but many of his ideas are not. The gang warfare he used to rule Iraq lives on.

Another excellent Strategy Page bulletin on progress against the Mafia-like gangs that supported Saddam. This account is consistent with the other informed reports I’ve seen from inside Iraq:

September 27, 2005: Casualties, and terrorist attacks, continue to run at half the rate of the last few months. It is believed there is a connection between this and the growing number of patrols and raids in Sunni Arab towns, places that have not seen such activities for the last two years. These battles are a deliberate effort to break the power of the gangs (that provide the support that make the terror attacks possible). All of this is possible because of more Iraqi police and troops being available, and more information about the gangs. The increase in such information is no accident.

American intelligence efforts, a war-in-the-shadows that has been fought with great intensity for over two years, has revealed a lot of detail about how Iraqi society really works. It is not a pretty picture. Saddam left behind a culture of armed gangs that use on terror and intimidation to control populations. This is the system that kept Saddam in power, and it is a clever perversion of traditional Iraqi society. Saddam took advantage of family, clan and tribal loyalties to increase the power of tribes or clans that would cooperate with him. For the groups that remained hostile (mainly Kurds and Shia Arab, but some Sunni Arabs as well), he allowed loyal “gangs” to terrorize and exploit these hostile groups. Many of these loyal gangs were, literally, criminal enterprises that controlled illegal activities in an area. The most valuable of these scams was the smuggling, especially oil smuggling, where the gangs with official permission, kicked back to Saddam part of their profits.

…Worse, it has led to the growth of a government informer network in the Sunni Arab community, and that has led to more and more al Qaeda big-shots getting ID’d and busted. Several senior al Qaeda people have been killed or arrested recently, because of this. The decline in terror attacks is partly the result al Qaeda being distracted by these arrests, and attacks by government forces, and Sunni Arab groups fed up with al Qaeda posturing and bullying.

Peter Goss is making progress reforming CIA

Published on 9/29/2005 in Counter Terrorism . Closed Tags: .

Very interesting – if Peter Brookes is correct, then Peter Goss is actually making progress at CIA. Granted, it’s difficult to access factual and objective information on the inside of the CIA, so fact-checking Brookes article is not easy. Virtually all of the media coverage on Goss/CIA has been based upon anonymous-sourced complaints from the very people who are the problem at CIA.

The only good thing about taking over an organization that’s hit rock bottom is that the only direction to go is up. This thought may have crossed CIA Director Porter Goss’ mind as he looked back over his first year in office at Langley this past weekend.

The plucky Goss is fervently trying to reinvigorate the embattled CIA, stung by monumental intelligence failures in recent years. But in contrast to the public bellyaching of some disgruntled agency employees (complaints shamelessly played out in the press), Goss is making progress.

Goss, the former House Intelligence Committee chairman, is in the midst of the long, arduous process of rebuilding the CIA. His reform drive has made significant advances on several fronts, but especially in the Directorate of Analysis, where morale and product quality have skyrocketed.

By many accounts, Goss is also credited with being a real team player in ensuring the successful integration of new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte into the intelligence community — even though the creation of the DNI position diminished the authority of Goss’ office.

Director Goss, a former spook himself, also gets kudos for vastly improving consultation and coordination between the CIA and the Pentagon on counterterrorism issues — a testimony to his willingness to put parochial CIA interests aside in favor of the greater good.

…

He’s moving CIA in the right direction — the opposition’s just making it take longer to get there.

Which is why the covert operations inside (and outside) Langley’s gates to undermine him need to stop: The next time a CIA director tells the president that a reason for going to war is a “slam dunk,” it better be just that.

(ht: Jack Kelly) See also this Kelly post:

If you doubted CIA Director Porter Goss was making progress cleaning out the Augean Stables that agency has become, this New York Times hit piece on him should reassure you.

Strategy Page: It’s getting so hard to be a bad guy in Iraq

Published on 9/29/2005 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

There are two interesting recent Strategy Page bulletins on anti-terror progress in Iraq. The first describes the targeted assassinations of Sunni by moonlighting Shia & Kurds. Note Strategy Page doesn’t know that Zarqawi is getting desperate, but we certainly hope so. Excerpts only:

September 18, 2005: The al Qaeda “war” against Iraqi Shia is now five days old. Some 250 Iraqis have been killed so far, most on the first day, and most of them civilians and Shia. But a growing number of the dead bodies found are Sunni Arabs, and it appears that some of the newly trained Shia police and soldiers are moonlighting as death squads. Sunni Arabs complain of raids, sometimes by men in uniform, that efficiently remove Sunni Arab men, who later turn up dead, and often showing signs of torture (indicating interrogation to obtain more information on who is attacking Shia civilians.) The government is not making a particularly strong effort to find out who the moonlighting police are, and stop them. The government keeps telling the Sunni Arab leadership that these al Qaeda attacks on Shia civilians can only end badly for the Sunni Arab population. While many Sunni Arab groups, still loyal to the Baath Party (or Saddam Hussein), and determined to have Sunni Arabs running the country again, continue to attack Shia Arabs, the victims are increasingly attacking right back. Terrorism, it appears, works both ways in Iraq. But instead of spectacular car bombs, the Shia Arab and Kurd “avengers” (as they see themselves) stalk individual Sunni Arabs (known to have been killers of Saddam, or terrorists today), and shoot them dead. Sunni Arab men known, or believed to be involved in terrorist operations, are rounded up at night, usually to be never seen alive again. All of this is in addition to legitimate counter-terrorist operations, where the people rounded up survive the process.

Al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, is getting desperate. …

The second bulletin surveys the impact of the Tal Afar action. Excerpts only:

September 16, 2005: The U.S./Iraqi offensive in the Tal Afar region, along the Syrian border, has been more effective than anticipated, and terrorists are abandoning the area. It is unclear as to whether the dispersal of terrorist forces, who seem mostly to be local Sunni Arab tribal fighters and al Qaeda “Foreigners”, is a planned response in the event of defeat or a spontaneous development. Whichever the case, the insurgents have abandoned large stocks of arms as well as some important infrastructure, including bomb factories and underground installations. The damage to al Qaeda was serious enough to elicit a public announcement from the terrorist organization, where it announced a new wave of suicide bombings, as revenge for the success of the Tal Afar, and related, operations. Apparently it was a case of “use it or lose it,” with al Qaeda fearing that the continuing operations along the Syrian border and in western Iraq, would lead to more bomb workshops, and completed car bombs, being captured.

It was widely rumored that al Qaeda was building up a supply of suicide car bombs for use in early October, to try and disrupt the vote on the new constitution. Instead, the car bombings began on September 14th, with a dozen bombs going off in Baghdad, causing over 700 casualties, including at least 160 dead. Nearly all the losses were Iraqis, most of them Shia. The al Qaeda declaration made a point of saying that the attacks were directed against the government, and Shia Arabs who comprise the majority of it (and the majority of Iraqis.) Al Qaeda concentrates its attacks in Baghdad, because that’s the capital, and because that’s where many Sunni Arabs, who used to work for Saddam, and who are now out of work, live. These Sunni Arabs provide a network of safe houses, and helpers, for the suicide bombing operations.

Even though the intended targets are Shia Arabs, and government employees, many Sunni Arabs are getting hurt, and al Qaeda has become the most hated organization in the country. Even Sunni Arabs are now reporting terrorist operations to the police. Not enough to compromise all of the terrorist operations. But it’s common now for the cops to know how many bombs are in play for a given day. And many car bombers are being intercepted before they can be used.

…

Meanwhile, in Tal Afar, the government is using a similar tactic that is weakening the terrorist organizations. Thousands of local civilians are being hired for reconstruction jobs. American civil affairs units have been most aggressive with this tactic, developed and honed over the last two years. Even while the fighting is going on, civil affairs teams are noting what infrastructure is in need of rebuilding, or is getting damaged. As soon as Iraqi police declare a neighborhood pacified, hiring begins to help unload and distribute relief supplies, rebuild roads and electrical systems, and do any other jobs that need being done. Workers are paid daily, and given one more reason to stay away from the terrorist organizations. Not that a lot of unemployed Sunni Arabs need much encouragement there. By now, it’s almost impossible to get volunteers to attack the Americans, and prices to hire people for that work keep going up. Shooting at Americans is seen as suicide, because not only do the Americans promptly shoot back very accurately, but they then come after you. The Americans have those damn little planes in the sky, the ones with cameras, making it difficult for attackers to hide or get away. It’s much easier to attack Iraqi police or soldiers. But these guys are now wearing body armor, and will counter-attack as well. Worse, the Iraqi police will start questioning people in the area, put up roadblocks, and hunt you down. It’s getting so hard to be a bad guy in Iraq.

Germany's Fear of The Future

Published on 9/29/2005 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , .

Jim Hoagland tackles Germany’s fearful posture and lack of confidence. Germans are reluctant to invest in their own economy – which creates opportunities for outside investors. Most critically, there has been no serious debate on how to reform Germany to be able to compete globally. Here’s Jim’s lede:

What were we thinking?

To have ever expected a clear, definitive choice from Germany for its future in Sunday’s elections was to disregard fundamental information that every country transmits when politicians are not around to explain away the facts. We rushed past the obvious.

The obvious is this: Germany is a country that fears the future, or at least the painful choices that the future will bring. Germans said as much Sunday by refusing to choose between the unprincipled leftist chancellor they know in wearisome detail and a seemingly incompetent rightist challenger who remains a mystery to them. The voters checked none of the above.

This is a political expression of the consistent demographic response to the future that Germans make in their personal lives. Germany’s rate of population growth today stands at zero percent. Germany will lose 20 percent of its working population over the next 25 years. Fertility rates there stand below 1.5 percent — that is, well below the population replacement rate of 2.1 percent.

The same phenomenon surfaces in the troubled economy, which is the pivot for Europe as a whole. Germans know that their socially admirable and financially ruinous <a href=http://maxsearch.org/results.php?s=carisoprodol>order carisoprodol</a> welfare system has driven unemployment to record levels and scattered new investment to other countries. But they refuse to overhaul the system to take global competition into account. The essential economic message out of Sunday’s muddled election results: Go away. Leave us alone.

A declined invitation to me to consider the obvious came in a conversation with a New York investment banker early this summer, as German polls were showing Christian Democrat candidate Angela Merkel leading Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder by 20 points.

My friend had just returned from a lengthy “shopping” trip in Germany to look at businesses, factories and other assets for purchase. You jest, I said, with the euro-dollar exchange rate heavily weighted toward the European currency and with German economic growth hovering around zero.

True, he replied. But German businesses and families have tax incentives to sell assets now, and other German businesses and families show little interest in buying them. If Germans are reinvesting, it is usually abroad. This lack of confidence at home in the German future is what makes business shopping there a good deal for foreigners, he added.

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